A YEAR on from going into administration Rangers fans continue to support their team in their thousands.. yet the club is being mismanaged.

THERE is now no such thing as a fan of another club. You are an enemy of Rangers.

You are incapable of simply supporting your team. If you follow anyone EXCEPT Rangers, you are rabid.

If you offer an opinion on Rangers? It cannot be honestly held. It cannot be neutral. It must be driven by an agenda. You are orchestrating, plotting, conniving.

And if you are still standing when they inevitably retake their place as masters of all they survey? You’ll be first up against the wall. Bank on it.

It was a year ago this week they went into administration. A year since the single biggest story in the history of Scottish sport broke and has yet to stop giving.

Yet for some, the hands on the clock haven’t moved an inch.

It’s still everyone else’s fault they are where they are. The architecture of their demise was never drawn by their own hand.

Here’s the thing, though.

Back in the summer, I thought it was exactly that kind of rhetoric that had their fans flocking through the gates in sheer defiance. I was wrong. Hands up.

Sure, maybe there was an element of it, with the claiming of world records and peeing-up-a-wall attendance comparisons with their former rivals across the city.

But the bottom line is the vast majority of their fans are simply there to support their team.

They’re there because it’s 3pm on a Saturday and it’s all they’ve ever wanted to do. If it wasn’t about that, the crowds would have plummeted long before now. That’s something I underestimated.

Their club should pay more heed to it, though.

They’re there for the game. Not to be combatants in a war that doesn’t exist.

It’s paranoia that would embarrass the twitchiest of coke addicts, the kind of deluded accusatory guff they used to wet themselves at when Celtic at their worst were peddling it.

But it’s only a smokescreen.

Get the fans to rail against the injustices perceived against them and it’ll give them their cause. Anything to quell any kind of questions being raised about the way the club are being run.

Because the bottom line is the club are being supported admirably – and managed abysmally. A long way beneath the dignity they claim to treasure.

We keep hearing they’re financially secure – so they bloody should be, shedding the debt they did with little more than a backwards glance then coining it in from a support piling in an eight-figure sum in season tickets.

So maybe the club’s hierarchy should direct their energy into giving them something worthy of their emotional and financial investment.

That’s why the vast majority of them are showing up.

They turn up to see their team playing opponents. Not enemies. And they’re being sold short.

Never was that more exposed than last weekend against Dundee United, a capitulation as embarrassing as it was predictable.

And one for which their excuses just don’t hold water.

Inexperienced? Five full internationals and four under-21 internationals in their starting line-up.

Young? The average age of their 11 was 26, compared to Dundee United’s 25.

The gulf between the two? Rangers wage budget is more than four, nearly five times that of United’s.

The transfer embargo limiting them? See excuse No.1.

In the league, they dropped more points by the end of December than Gretna did in the entire season they won the Third Division on a supposedly outrageous spending spree – that was less than a TENTH of what Rangers are spending to get there.

There’s absolutely no excuse that they’re still running at a loss, even in the short-term.

But the more they act like the North Korea of the football world, the less scrutiny they’ll suffer from their own support.

Which is, after all, one of the things that brought about their downfall in the first place.

It’s hard to believe it’s been a year, though, right?

It feels about 10 have passed since that day when Duff and Duffer sat and squirmed their way through that first announcement in the media room at Ibrox.

In the interim, Charles Green has gone from the devil incarnate to messiah, creaming a lovely earner for himself from their share issue along the way.

It remains to be seen whether he’s in it for the long haul or not.

What’s clear, however, is that the support are – and while they may buy tickets forever, they surely can’t keep buying the snake oil.

****

ONE in the win column for the wee guy last week, with the news that FIFA are forcing Bradford to pay 250,000 Euros to Falkirk for the Mark Stewart transfer.

They thought they were working the system, and had a highly paid team of lawyers backing them – thankfully the system has protected the club developing the talent.

The Bairns’ biggest fear though was winning the case and Bradford having no money to stump up. With the Bantams’ boasts of millions earned on the way to Wembley, however, that’s one excuse they can’t use.

****

Celtic’s domestic fragility will become a total irrelevance on Tuesday night.

In the absence of Old Firm games to live for and obsess over, two legs against Juventus at this stage of the Champions League will more than compensate.

And anyone who’s saying with certainty they’re doomed, simply because of the quality of the opposition, clearly hasn’t been paying attention.

****

Billy Davies has been out of the game too long for a manager of his ability.

Maybe that’s why he has jumped into a managerial minefield at Nottingham Forest.

Sean O’Driscoll and Alex McLeish have been bombed in recent months.

Watch your step, wee man.

****

Sergejus Fedotovas reckons Hearts’ money woes have made them the best young team in Scotland.

Maybe if they appreciated they had a system capable of producing such talent six or seven years ago, instead of throwing cash away on the owner’s extravagant whims and overpaid duds, they might not have fallen into the ditch they’re in now.

In howling conditions, it was a competent performance. No more, no less.

But if Gordon Strachan gives guys like Shaun Maloney and Chris Burke the freedom to express themselves – like they did at Pittodrie in midweek – on a regular basis, there’s hopefully a lot to look forward to.